My poem This Burning is included in the anthology Sacred Fire.
The poem was inspired by the true life story of a father I met at a mental health conference in San Diego, and my subsequent drive home through a night-blaze in the hills north of Los Angeles:
This Burning
In the dark ahead, it floats like an orange mirage,
eerie flame of light in the hills that surround Los Angeles
like taut, brown undulations—driving back from a conference
about youth, abused & neglected—how the world swims
in alternating waves of fierce light & dim shades of despair.
The plenary speaker with his grim tale of childhood—
the rapes, the abuse—how the system saved his life,
foster parents lifting him up far enough
to stand on his own DNA & the mysteries of karmic spirit
carrying his story to the New York Times,
his work to three presidential citations for excellence.
Now the road winds higher through the night as the orange glow
grows brighter, remembering the next speaker, Azim—
Persian born in Africa, educated in England,
financial consultant turned crusader against the violence
that took his son in the streets of San Diego,
a college student delivering pizza unfazed by the bogus address
in the run-down neighborhood, the 14 year old gang-banger
waiting for him with the gun, told he’d become a man
by taking the other one down. And in the aftermath,
Azim finding the 14 year old boy’s grandfather, saying
my son’s death must come to mean something—
how they banded together bent on saving at least one more,
and another, then another. How his eyes burned
as I shook his hand, thanked him for his story,
told him it means everything—
how I drove silently in the night
into the heaving hills of Los Angeles afire, so close now,
not knowing if there would be a way through,
the black asphalt road leading inexorably
into the smoke-orange flame of the grapevine,
the only way out being through—and there it was,
the fire-break, the very road I was on, separating
Hades’ heat on one side from the quiet untouched hills
on the other. In between, in this eerie safety
of windshield & engine & wheels, I see
there is but one way to travel this world,
and it is towards, not away,
from this burning.